Traitorous Trump Going Down

What more do you need to know about Trump?

Trump did it and he’s going down for a host of crimes, and some of them have nothing to do with Russia

Lucian K. Truscott IV

May 19, 2018

I’ve been “covering” the Trump story for over a year now, and I’m sick and tired of stacking up the details of his treachery day after day, week after week. What more do you need to know? He’s a lying, thieving, incompetent, ignorant traitor who conspired with the Russian government to steal the election of 2016 and illegally defeat a candidate who won the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. His presidency is illegitimate, and his occupation of the White House is a stain on our nation’s honor and a threat to our democracy. History will cast him into the same sewer in which float the putrid remains of Benedict Arnold, Jefferson Davis and Richard Nixon. Impeachment would be too kind an end for him. He belongs behind bars, broken, bankrupt and disgraced.

Every day the front pages of the newspapers and the headlines of the cable news shows are filled with evidence of Trump’s lies and thievery. Look at what happened this week alone.

Trump started out denying that he even knew Stormy Daniels, then he denied having a sexual relationship with her, then he said he didn’t know about any payoffs to her. Monday, he filed his required federal financial disclosure form in which he effectively admitted making the $130,000 payment to shut her up just before the election in 2016.

He did an about-face on trade restrictions on China, announcing that he would seek to help the Chinese communications giant ZTE, which paid a $1.2 billion fine last year for violating sanctions against trade with North Korea and Iran. Three days previously, China had issued a half-billion dollar loan to a development project in Singapore that includes Trump-branded hotels, golf courses and condos.

He opened the American embassy in Jerusalem, a move he had been warned would result in fighting and deaths in the Middle East — and sure enough, dozens of Palestinians were killed on the day the embassy opened during demonstrations in the Gaza Strip.

The Trump White House refused to apologize for a sick joke made about John McCain by one of his aides.

Trump’s former secretary of state gave a commencement speech at VMI in which he made repeated veiled criticisms of Trump’s lying and warned gravely “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a subpoena to a former aide of Trump’s long-time consultant Roger Stone, who has admitted being in touch during the campaign of 2016 with a Russian intelligence agent involved in the hacking of the Democratic Party emails.

A major story in Buzzfeed on Thursday detailed work by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen on a 100-story Trump skyscraper in Moscow during 2015 right through the Republican National Convention in 2016. It was revealed that Trump signed a “Letter of Intent” on the Moscow project on the day of the third Republican primary debate on Oct. 28, 2015, in Boulder, Colorado. ABC News reported last week that Trump has denied having deals in Russia “hundreds of times in the past 18 months.” Just before the inauguration in 2017, for example, Trump tweeted:

Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

A Qatar deal was announced. The revelation follows a report that during the transition in 2016, a Qatari diplomat was asked by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for a $1 million “fee” in return for arranging connections to the Trump family. The government of Qatar bought a $6.5 million apartment in Trump World Tower on the east side of Manhattan recently.

The news of last week was a perfect mix of lies, thievery, buffoonery and malice that have characterized the entirety of Trump’s presidency.

He promised to get rid of Obamacare “on day one.” He failed. Obamacare is alive and well and enjoyed record registrations last year.

His executive orders on everything from immigration to environmental regulations have ignored requirements for public comments and simple federal paperwork and face lawsuits from one end of the country to the other.

He claimed that “nobody has been tougher on Russia than I have.” He has refused to enact most of the sanctions on Russia passed by Congress.

He appointed a hatchet man who had sued the EPA over a dozen times to head up the agency and that man, Scott Pruitt, currently faces no less than 14 investigations of his tenure there, including allegations that he broke federal laws on office renovations and accepting gifts from lobbyists when he rented a room at below-market rates from a lobbyist with business before his agency.

Last week he claimed he raised military pay for “the first time in 10 years.” President Obama raised military pay in every year of his presidency.

Trump has claimed repeatedly that his White House “is running like a fine-tuned machine.” He filled it with wife beaters, worn-out Wall Street bucket shop shysters and half-baked neo-Nazi flacks. At this point, more than 40 top White House officials and aides have either resigned or been fired over the last 18 months. The place leaks like a shredded fish net.

The Washington Post recently reported that the lies he has told in office now number more than 3,000.

But it’s his lies about Russia that really ring a bell. Trump and his White House surrogates began by claiming that the Trump campaign never met with any Russians and had nothing to do with Russia. Revelation after revelation about contacts between Trump people and Russians followed. Then they claimed they had met with only a few Russians. More revelations about more Russians. Then they claimed they had not met with any Russians “about the campaign.” The Trump Tower meeting was revealed. Meets between George Papadopoulos and Russians in London came to light. Trump suddenly started claiming that there was “no collusion.” Evidence of collusion emerged. Then Trump began claiming that even if there was collusion, it was not illegal. Indictments came down. Now Rudy Giuliani is out there telling the world that even if Trump did something wrong, he can’t be indicted as a sitting president.

Wow. Watching Trump revisions on the Russia story is like watching a Slinky descend a staircase, flipping over and over and over and over.

But every set of stairs has a bottom and in Trump’s case, it’s the law. His lies and dissembling about Stormy Daniels came up against the law this week when he had to file his financial disclosure form. Lying or omitting information on a federal form is a felony, which is why Trump was forced to include the repayment of his debt to Michael Cohen which covered the $130,000 that had been paid out to silence Stormy Daniels in October of 2016. He lied about her and he lied about that payment until he came up against the law and then he was forced to tell the truth.

He has reached the ground floor with Russia and everything else. You can lie at rallies, you can lie to the media, you can lie to voters, but lies don’t work when they come up against laws. That’s where Trump finds himself today. He’s a lying, thieving traitor who conspired with a hostile nation to steal the presidential election of 2016 and he got caught. Not even his bone spurs will get him a deferment this time. He’s going to be drafted for the farm team at Leavenworth. He’s going down.

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. He can be followed on Facebook at The Rabbit Hole and on Twitter @LucianKTruscott.

https://www.salon.com/2018/05/19/what-more-do-you-need-to-know-about-trump/

Latest Cheating Scandal Rocks Chess World

I would like to answer the question posed by Mike Thomas in the comment he left to the post The United Scholastic Chess Federation. He asked, “Why do Priest’s and Bauer’s incorrect answers merit criticism as attempts at misdirection by chess politicians?”
I found the answers given to the question posed humorous. Imagine, I thought, what if one member of each state got up to answer a question by informing the House of Representatives how things are done in their state. Oh, wait, they do! Fortunately it is confined to C-Span. I only watch the channel when the politicos go home and it morphs into BookTV.
I cannot understand why Mr. Thomas thought what I wrote was criticism (I have absolutely no idea where Mike got the idea I wrote anything concerning, “…attempts at misdirection by chess politicians?”), when, as a journalist, all I did was report what is on the forum of the USCF website. I noted there were only two comments made and after checking, those are still the only comments. Poor Alex still has not received an answer to his question. Mr. Bauer and Mr. Priest are, or have been, chess politicians. Some politicians provide more humor than late night comedians; think John McCain and Sarah Palin. All politicians are in the public eye. They make decisions affecting We the People. The same goes for chess politicians. They, as all other politicians, should be questioned. Why is it considered criticism when one questions the actions of elected public officials? Most politicians grant interviews and schedule question and answer sessions with journalists. Such is not the case with chess politicos. It is rare to find a question and answer session, or interview, with a chess politician. One such rarity is an informative interview of USCF Executive Board President Ruth Haring in the September 2012 issue of the California Chess Journal by Aditya Kumar. Racking my brain failed to bring recollection of the last time, if there has been one, I read an extended interview like the one with Ms. Haring. A PDF of the issue containing the interview can be found at the CalChess website: http://www.norcalchess.org/
I applaud Ruth for publishing in Chess Life magazine the graph vividly illustrating one of the major problems facing USCF, the problem of membership retention. Seeing is believing and seeing the graph has rocked many in the chess community. “Membership retention” in this case means finding a way to halt the hemorrhaging of very young preteen members. The fact is the USCF has been akin to a pyramid, or Ponzi scheme. Adult membership has dropped to a point where, if for any reason, the parents of very young children stop purchasing memberships there are not enough adult members to sustain the USCF. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the so-called “Fischer boomers” are rapidly aging, and with age comes death. The dead may vote, but they no longer become members.
From my many years in chess I have learned most people are involved for one reason, that being to play! Most do not care about the politics of chess, wanting to know only, “When is the next tournament?” Whether on a local or national level there are few people willing to attempt running an organization. There has been little scrutiny, almost to the point of a “need to know” basis. There are only a few people actually controlling the operation of chess, which would seem to be all the more reason for someone to be asking the tough questions.
One of the major problems facing the chess world is the problem of using the assistance of programs to cheat. An ongoing cheating scandal has afflicted Major League Baseball since before the beginning of this century, and it continues. Monday a “dirty dozen” MLB players were suspended for what is being called “cheating.” For example, on the show MLB NOW, one of the talking heads said, “Continued talk of cheating is bad for baseball.” Another head talked about, “How we got to this point because people sat there and did not say anything.” Every week there is news of yet another cheating scandal. This appeared on the Chessbase website August 4, “A cheating scandal rocked the Dortmund Open.” Continued talk of cheating is bad for chess. Some organization needs to step-up to the plate. I have more faith in the ET’s the President of FIDE, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is said to have visited, to take appropriate measures than FIDE.

Of the two major issues facing organized chess, the latter is paramount. If measures are not taken the first problem will not exist because there will not be any members to retain. If the USCF board members held a press conference the first question asked should be, “How do you plan to address the onerous problem of the perception by the public of rampant cheating in chess tournaments?”
MLB players cheated because there were big bucks involved. The stakes in chess are just as huge, albeit on a lower monetary level. For example, in a column in the Washington Times, “At Cadets, one short chess game leads to one big payout for New Yorker,” David Sands writes, “It was one of the bigger payoffs you’re going to see riding on a single game of rapid chess: $145,624 for less than a half hour of work. That’s how the math worked out at the U.S. Cadet Championship in Rockville last week, as New York NM Justus Williams defeated fellow master Michael Brown of California in their rapid Game/25 playoff after the two tied for first at 4½-2½ in the eight-player invitational for the strongest American players under 16. The stakes: a full four-year scholarship to collegiate chess powerhouse University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which, according to the school’s website, is worth $36,406 a year for an out-of-stater like Williams.” (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/30/sands-at-cadets-one-short-chess-game-leads-to-one-/ )
This is Big Money in chess. Players have cheated for much less. I must mention the absurdity of that much money riding on a quick-play game. It does not take a Bob Dylan to see the wind is blowing in the direction of ever faster time controls. Even the World Chess Championship is now decided by quick-play games! If it is more difficult, if not impossible, to cheat during a fast game, then all games will become quick-play in the future. Imagine what it would do to the scholastic foundation upon which the USCF is now based if the headline had been, “Cheating Scandal Rocks US Cadet Championship.”